$100 Laptop Per Child Project Rolls Out
The lovely Jane at Girl Gamer Advance reports the One Laptop Per Child Project has received their first order for three million laptops to hopefully ship out in October of this year. The project was formed to put low-cost laptops in the hands of children in developing countries as an educational aid. Production has been ramped up of the low-cost machine to meet the order. The organization has not revealed which countries have bought the laptops, but this is a huge step for the organization.
They were able to reduce the cost of the XO laptop by using cheaper parts than those usually used in consumer machines. That does not mean the computer will be incapable of being a fast machine, since the OS is built on a skinny Linux kernel and should not be burdened with the resource requirements associated with PC or Mac operating systems.
The XO was built to withstand rugged use in areas like the deserts of Libya or the mountains of Peru, with energy conservation being a primary design initiative. There are no moving parts in the machine and the screen has multiple display settings to maximize energy consumption. Instead of a hard drive, the XO uses 1GB of flash memory to house the operating system and doubles as the main storage device.
For more information on the XO and One Laptop Per Child, visit their site.
'$100 laptop' production begins [BBC News]
[via Game Girl Advance]
Toots
Posted to Miscellany, Videos on 26 July 2007
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: education, one laptop per child, xo
Now I expect they will all want a free copy of Crysis to play on it!
I saw the video and a I cried quite a bit. It's wonderful to see that there are still people out there that care about their fellow humans.
Oh man, I'm still crying after watching the video!
/goes off to check their site
What a noble endeavor. I've always said the poor should be able to download porn too.
(On a serious note, this did bring a tear to my eye too. What a great project!)
too bad there's nothing like this in the US.
Hate to break everyones bubbles...turns out what these laptops are most used for is downloading porn. But thats what the net is for :D